April 20, 2017

You could call Ralph Winter one of the fathers of the modern cinematic superhero. Before Spider-Man made a mint in 2002 and Iron Man put an Arc reactor into the genre in 2008, the Hollywood producer shepherded X-Men to theaters in 2000—proving that serious superhero movies could be both good and lucrative. He’s also one of Hollywood’s most prominent Christians. His latest project, The Promise, in theaters tomorrow, April 21, straddles both the secular and spiritual worlds. It’s predicated on... Read more

April 16, 2017

On Easter, my second father was actually dying. Read more

April 7, 2017

A couple of days ago, the big-budget drama The Promise was screened at The Vatican. Director Terry George, producer Eric Esrailian and some of the actors were at the screening, and Variety says the whole affair was “a clear sign of Catholic Church support ahead of the film’s upcoming U.S. release.” Whether that means that the Catholic Church loves the movie, well, that’s perhaps not so clear. But to just screen the movie at all was indeed a strong statement that will ruffle... Read more

April 6, 2017

A couple of days ago, the big-budget drama The Promise was screened at The Vatican. Director Terry George, producer Eric Esrailian and some of the actors were at the screening, and Variety says the whole affair was “a clear sign of Catholic Church support ahead of the film’s upcoming U.S. release.” Whether that means that the Catholic Church loves the movie, well, that’s perhaps not so clear. But to just screen the movie at all was indeed a strong statement that will ruffle... Read more

March 31, 2017

Heard of Slamma Jamma? I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s pretty awful. Or, depending on how you look at it, awful pretty. It’s the story of Michael Diggs, a college basketball star who spent six years in the slammer for armed robbery and/or being an accessory to murder (we hear both), but who now believes in God and wants to find redemption through a series of slam dunk competitions. The basketball gymnastics we see here range from the credible... Read more

March 28, 2017

Silence, Martin Scorsese’s beautiful, difficult and overlooked masterpiece on faith, is out on Blu-Ray and DVD as of this very day. I’ll be buying it and watching it again—forcing anyone I can to watch it with me. Admittedly, it’s not a fun movie to watch. Unlike most “Christian” movies we’re familiar with, Silence isn’t interested in encouraging its audience or bolstering its collective faith. Instead, it takes Christian moviegoers on a dark, unblinking journey through the valley of the shadow... Read more

March 23, 2017

No more Friars. No more Demon Deacons. Even those hated Blue Devils are gone. The NCAA Basketball Tournament has been hard on teams with religious nicknames. And for casual fans like to inject a little spiritual insanity into their March Madness (and whose brackets are already busted), it’s hard to know just who to root for. Is there a team that a Christian can embrace because of the team’s spirituality? Who would Jesus pick? Well, fear not, casual fans. This... Read more

March 16, 2017

I’m pretty sure that Bill Condon wishes he had just kept his mouth shut. Condon, director of Disney’s soon-to-be-blockbuster Beauty and the Beast, told the British magazine Attitude that one of the characters, LeFou, has a “nice, exclusively gay moment” in the film. And with those words, an otherwise innocuous PG film became a flashpoint to the still surprisingly lively culture wars weeks before its release. Some people loved the concept of a “gay moment” in a Disney flick, of... Read more

March 14, 2017

We’re in the middle of Lent right now, a time of year when many Christians try to be especially mindful of Jesus and the incredible sacrifice He made for us. Its 40-day duration is meant to remind us of Jesus’ time in the wilderness. We give things up for Lent as a form of fasting. The whole season, if we observe it, is meant to bring us closer to God. Little wonder that so many Christian filmmakers release their movies during... Read more

March 10, 2017

We can’t ignore the 800-ton gorilla in the room. Kong: Skull Island stomps into theaters today, pounding his chest, tearing apart dinosaurs and (its makers hope) thrilling a new generation of moviegoers. If we’ve learned anything since Kong first appeared 84 years ago, it’s that we just can’t get enough of the big lug. Kong made his debut in 1933 in the classic King Kong, and the gorilla’s original story has all the flavor of a Greek tragedy: This gigantic... Read more

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